This editorial first appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Southwest Airlines might have cleared away the mountains of luggage in airport baggage areas around the country and finally gotten passengers to their destinations, but that doesn’t come close to addressing the serious problems that ruined the holiday travel of millions of passengers and their family members.
The airline still has lots of explaining to do, even as it tries to make passengers whole for having robbed them of Christmas gatherings and other big holiday plans. Vouchers and apologies won’t cut it.
One passenger missed her own wedding. Another was threatened with arrest for the crime of standing in line while awaiting rebooking of her flight. An airline attendant characterized line-waiting as trespassing and summoned police officers to make people leave. There are probably hundreds of thousands of other nightmare stories that still need to be told.
It’s the responsibility of Southwest Chief Executive Bob Jordan to personally address those passengers so he can fully understand how badly his management team has destroyed customers’ and stockholders’ trust.
Southwest tried at first to blame it on the weather. But that excuse fell flat when nearly all other airlines recovered quickly and got their flight schedules back on track.
Certainly, the weather played a major role, but fundamental organizational and infrastructure problems within Southwest were the main culprits. They were years in the making, with senior managers’ full knowledge that the airline was vulnerable to exactly the disaster that occurred.
The problems are twofold: Southwest has long been warned that its flight-management computer software is out of date. The airline has been using 1990s-era software to cope with a far more complex 2020s-era travel environment.
The other problem is rooted in Southwest’s point-to-point scheduling of flights and crews. Other major airlines use a hub-and-spoke system that overlaps crews and equipment to easily redirect them if a disruption occurs. Point-to-point scheduling means a plane flies from, say, St. Louis to Dallas, then to Albuquerque and Phoenix. If the Dallas leg breaks down, passengers in Albuquerque and Phoenix suffer. Multiply that by 15,000, and that’s what happened last month.
Lots of Southwest passengers remain loyal. They love the unorthodox boarding lineup system and the casual, often humorous way crew members and pilots talk to passengers during flights. None of that is to blame. Senior managers are the ones who knew about infrastructure problems and failed to correct them.
If it takes hauling them into court or before Congress to explain themselves, so be it. But first and foremost, Southwest passengers deserve to be made whole for their suffering and expense.
